Interest in Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet delivery service is high across the world, with new countries being added to the eligible pool every few days. Recently The B.C. Catholic interviewed an early adopter couple here in Canada to get a real-world perspective on Starlink usage.
Dale and Roslyn Mugford live in Prince Edward County, Ontario, where Dale is a senior web and software designer/developer, and Roslyn is the founder and CEO of Double Barrel Studios Inc.
B.C. Catholic: Yours is among the first Canadian households to sign up for and receive a Starlink home internet dish and receiver/router. Before we get into that aspect, would you describe Prince Edward County, Ontario, where you live, and the state of your home internet service prior to the arrival of Starlink?
Dale and Roslyn Mugford: Prince Edward County (PEC) has around 26,000 residents spread out over a fairly large land area. In recent years internet service has improved in the town centres but has remained notoriously poor outside of them. Expensive, slow, unreliable – these are frequently used terms in discussion of PEC’s internet options.
As I work in software development and my wife in video and animation production, we’re both in need of quality internet. We knew it would be a challenge living here but figured we could get by – using the co-working space in Picton, or cafes in nearby Trenton/Belleville when a better connection was required. Once the pandemic hit, however, we really felt the bite of poor internet service not being able to go anywhere.
We were now permanently working from home, and our son who was previously in Ottawa at university was now home too, putting additional stress on our network.
We had two connections – both with Bell. A 10/1 DSL connection, and a 50/10 LTE fixed wireless connection, capped at 350 GB with $4/GB overage fees up to $100 max. These two connections cost us a combined $355/month, since we’d always go over the cap.
I set up a dual WAN router to make the most out of the two connections, trying to load balance and distribute traffic to avoid overages and maximize the connections. The DSL was not much in terms of bandwidth, but low latency and unlimited. The LTE had higher bandwidth, but also higher latency and inconsistent speeds, with 6–10 p.m. most nights being the poorest, seeing speeds between 0.5 and 3 Mbps down.
Most folks aren’t as savvy as us and just struggle along with one connection.
BCC: How is the Starlink service important to you? Would you describe it as a game-changer?
DRM: Having moved from the city to the country, I’d describe it as going back to the future!
Firstly, it’s going to save us considerably over the long term. Financially we could justify the high costs as business expenses but obviously would prefer not to have to pay so much for what amounted to poor service.
Secondly, it’s completely a game-changer. In particular, solid upload bandwidth. With much better upload bandwidth we’re able to create, not just consume.
The flexibility of installation location and the freedom to truly work from anywhere reliably are what Starlink offers.
BCC: Elon Musk has said that the Starlink setup is as simple as pointing a dish, the “pizza on a stick,” at the sky and turning on the box, and that those steps can occur in either order. How would you describe the setup, and how soon after the unpacking of the shopping boxes did you determine you had made a good choice?
DRM: Dishy McFlatface [the user terminal] is a well-designed, good-looking dish! Everything was plugged in where it should be when it arrived. The setup process is dead simple – I’m confident anyone could do it.
The longest time I spent was actually the day before – setting up a sturdy temporary wooden table in the field beside our house.
The trickiest part for most is using the app to make sure your Starlink is in a good location, free from obstructions to get a clear view of the northern sky. The next most difficult part would be installing it permanently, but many local installers are becoming familiar with the hardware and available to help for a fee.
BCC: There is a significant upfront cost to Starlink. That aside, how do your monthly service charges compare to what you paid previously?
DRM: To be honest, we didn’t find the upfront cost to be expensive when compared directly with what we were already paying monthly. And it’s not that clear on the Starlink website, but the initial payment includes your first month of service ($129).
Overall, it’s a reasonable trade-off when you examine the alternatives. Some service providers want to lock you in to a year or two-year contract to set up their hardware. With Starlink you pay up front, but it’s just month-to-month, no hassle and easy to cancel.
BCC: It is early days yet in terms of experience with Starlink, but if for some reason it were to be taken away from you by, say, regulatory action, would the Charlton Heston line “from these cold, dead hands” be apropos?
DRM: A hundred per cent. I’d join a protest anywhere, anytime, to advocate that this service remains available. It’s so dramatically better, it would be punishment to have to go back to what we had.
Truthfully, we really would prefer to use a Canadian internet service provider. So if this lights a fire for domestic telecommunications companies to offer more competitive services and they’d be comparable or better, we’d happily switch to that.
BCC: Was the “work from home” movement driven by COVID-19 a factor in your Starlink decision?
DRM: I think we would have likely purchased it regardless, considering it’s a better service at a better price than what was available to us, though COVID-19 and the essential requirement to be working from home made it a no-brainer.
BCC: Might Starlink suddenly drive a real estate demand boom in communities such as yours?
DRM: Maybe in a few years. I’ve talked to some city friends that inquired when they saw my photos, as they weren’t even aware of Starlink. I think it’ll take a few years for the service to be known in the public mindset and become a factor in people considering and committing to moving to more remote places.
BCC: Have others in your area taken note of your Starlink dish, and your experiences, and made a decision to follow in your footsteps?
DRM: On social media many county folks who weren’t aware of the service and beta test have been asking those of us who have it all sorts of questions. The majority of them have now pre-ordered it for when it’s available for wider release.
BCC: Do you see any downsides as yet to your Starlink use?
DRM: Nothing will beat a solid cable or fibre internet solution. Dishy is still subject to typical satellite weather degradation, such as ice, snow, rain, and thunderstorms. Even a plane flying overhead of its view constitutes a brief obstruction.
So it’s not perfect or perfectly reliable but is a vast improvement over what we previously had.
I do have concerns about its capacity as a network overall to handle many users; whether data caps, network traffic shaping, throttling, and other typical ISP behaviours will be employed, which could depreciate the quality of service; cost increases and tier structures which offer the same existing service at a higher price once it’s publicly available.
The first concern probably is the most significant for rural internet users. When Xplornet first offered its fixed wireless LTE service, everyone said it was great. Once word caught on and many switched over to it, the towers became oversubscribed, and the service performance dropped dramatically. The same for Bell’s fixed wireless LTE. Essentially, every time a new/better service becomes available for rural users it’s not long before it becomes unable to support them.
BCC: Has SpaceX/Starlink placed any restrictions on the use of its service and equipment?
DRM: Beyond a typical ISP service agreement, you can’t use the dish outside your service address currently. The WiFi router/access point that ships with the kit is nice-looking but limited in its functionality currently. You can, however, easily connect your own WiFi router, and it works perfectly alongside theirs.
BCC: Has your previous supplier tried to win you back with incentives, or is there simply no comparison, or ability to play catch up with Starlink?
DRM: I cancelled before they caught wind of the churn and was only offered to have my data cap removed after 350 GB (but be throttled to 20 Mbps down).
No price change to match Starlink, nor any better service.
I declined, obviously.
I’ve heard others say existing ISPs have been better articulating their competitive offerings now, but I haven’t heard of anyone convinced to stay with their existing ISP, so the offers mustn’t be that compelling!
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There you have it: one Canadian household’s experiences with the disruptive SpaceX Starlink project bringing high-performance internet service direct from, ultimately, tens of thousands of satellites to homes across the globe in areas with poor or no internet service.
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